Digitisation of cultural heritage of minority communities for equity and renewed engagement

Cultural heritage (CH) digitisation brought great opportunities to preserve, maintain and promote it. Yet, it also triggers challenges in terms of representation and content exhibition. This becomes particularly pressing in the context of CH of minorities. Overall, this reduces participation and inclusion of minorities, hindering equitable representations of diverse values in digitisation, leading to increased risks of misuse of digital CH. DIGICHer tackles these challenges by providing new understanding on key legal and policy, socio-economic and technological factors governing digitisation of minorities’ CH. Following the citizen science and co-creation approach DIGICHer develops a novel scalable framework and methods to promote equitable, diverse and inclusive practices, verified via user-centric approaches through pilots with minority groups in the EU. On these bases, it develops recommendations for policy and decision makers, as well as CH institutions, and delivers methods for decision support to monitor the field of digital heritage with specific regards to its diversity long-term.